Open Access Week (Oct 22-28, 2012) provides
an excellent time for a little reflection on the state of our access to
research and scholarship. While some of us had been hoping for a digital
revolution in access to research and scholarship that would suddenly and fully turn
this entire realm of learning into a vast public asset, we are coming to accept
that, instead, a series of evolutionary
forces are underway, at least when you look at things as a matter of a
decade or two, rather than over eons of time.

The evolutionary
markers, well worth celebrating this year, are found in the growing acceptance
of open access as a guiding principle for scholarly communication. The markers
include the gradual increases this year, to over 8,000 journals, in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the 250 open
access mandates among universities, departments and institutes included in ROARMAP. Also notable, perhaps as more
of a moment of punctuated equilibrium in this evolution, is the first open
access journal from the American Psychological Association, with a lovely retro
title, Archives of Scientific Psychology,
which will also feature, according to its editors,
open data sharing and open reviews. MIT Press has also been among the
publishers experimenting with open access approaches to journals and books.

Another relatively
recent source of open-access innovation comes from the rise of mega-journals,
following in the footsteps of PLoS
One, (with roughly 14,000 articles annually), including the Nature Publishing
Group, with Scientific Reports, the Royal
Society, with Open Biology, and from the British
Medical Association, BMJ Open. The
mega-journal, tapping the article-processing-fees model, forms a notable
instance of where this move toward open access has led to a new publishing
principle affecting scholarly communication. By publishing on the principle that
the peer-reviewed competence and contribution of a paper should be sufficient
to warrant immediate publication in the digital age, given no real restrictions
on journal size (compared to print) and the sheer epistemological
inefficiencies of a highly discriminatory journal hierarchy.

As Phil
Davis points out, the mega-journal model raises equity issues for authors
and may disrupt non-profit society publishing. The cautions are well-noted, but
still it is hard to resist, having wished and worked for this increased access,
concluding that an irrevocable evolution toward this opening of research and
scholarship is underway. But then a moment’s reflection reminds one that the
Royal Society of London was behind such an opening from the very beginning of
journal publishing, if perhaps without the business acumen that it may now be showing.